Joyelle McSweeney

THE BOMB OF AMHERST (Tied to Time’s vine. Wants an EXIT.)

Let’s tuberose, evacuate

Tobacco Road like a tribe of feckless maricóns or a vinyl tube

fed down the throat for suctioning Time’s lungs. From the hands of the steroided

orderly let’s slip let’s slit Time’s change purse and flit

like expired lottery tickets and loose change into

the pale uncreaséd palm of the teen pickpocket,

Death. Death’s hand signals from the clockface, up, now down.

It taps an index on its nosecone or feathered crown

fetid with bird flu and viral bomblettes. Let’s litter

like Wrigley wrappers  tossed by the bomber’s crew, migrate

beyond the cardinal directions, fuster-ate the sonar

Descartean grid with our baby boom, goof off

like a bomb-squad dolphin pod high on nitrous

our slit-gills slick with goo,

our slack chins Death’s stirrup. Ride!

Too much time in the weinermobile

too much time at the zoo

zoning out and hoovering up that exhausted fume perfume.

Let’s be gone now, let’s beget ‘gone’ now, pancakes

on the O-ring, send up their bubble signals,

Jiffypop, bye. Time’s sticky lung and foil hairdo

has been cookin all day on that Teflon lawnchair

like a double-breasted matinee-idol-cum-president

just cooks with the investors on the asylum’s deck

his hair a plastic black wave imitating an air-filled garbage bag or

miner’s lung or Death or cantilevered deck where it

hangs off the edge of its bluff: Time’s air traffic control strike, Time’s

missile defense, Time’s iron curtain, T-cell count, swollen lymph node,

area code, Time’s IP address, detonate, Time’s IRS, evade.

The digital timepiece and modular nodular virus keeps

switching its whiptail up and fills my wells

till I’m a girl again, I’m a psychopathic pigtail

off the rails, eyelashes curled up for the big meet, I’m positive for the pathogenic protein

which splits my thinkin into multiple dubious lines. Choose one.

One victim, one scape goat, one exit strategy, one escape.

Stop rending your pathetic nails on the pathetic grate. Death

knits a tutu for me of shredded Time and keratin.

Your magic’s no good on me cause I’m made of magic,

Time, juju and mojo and koolaid and crushed ice. Hit me, take a hit off me Old Masters and

ahh. sublime surmise, surprise like a blowhard breaks the chokehold

whereupon the bruised vocal chords of the victim playback the blow that kilt her,

scream. Now you have me now you have so many neurons like me

for carrying bad news, el-ec-triss-uh-tee fe-liss-uh-tee,

fleur-de-lis, gapemeters, the defunct credit line

revolves and melts its vinyl method into the thigh, shows

its polymeric breakdown

over Time. Raincoats! Time’s condom is ripping, Time’s myelin sheathe

is shredding, spreading, Time’s retina sags and reports

a lot of shit that isn’t there, plastic fleshrain falls into

the pits melted into Time’s plastic

cheek, Time’s bored cop loops the block,

Time’s red lights are listlessly reeling but Time’s siren forgets to wail,

craps the bed and casts its deep penumbral bedsheet enchantingly

out a wide veronica illicitly makes a still meadow of, shadows the

wings and annexes and the galleries and mimics Death, 

whoops.  Shit-lilies giggle and nod

like girls on their thin stems, Time, pleural,  sucks

a deplorable hit from its dim condition, Death’s

forehead breaks the plane of day like dawn

from its deep position.  Pumps shrill whine.

Joyelle McSweeney’s PercussionGrenade, featuring poems for performance and a play, is now available from Fence; Salamandrine, 8 Gothics, a book of short & spooky prose and another play, is due out this fall from Tarpaulin Sky.